Friday, June 5, 2015

E is for...Elven: New Series Announcement #SpankA2Z

It may seem a little soon to be announcing new books, with Late Blooming Lily only three days released (and, I'm delighted to say, currently hanging out in the top 100 of Amazon's BDSM list and gaining lovely responses from readers who enjoy late-life romance as much as I do).  I do hope you'll pick it up for some weekend fun if you haven't yet!  But I just received a publication date of July 16 for my the first novel in my new Fae Surrender series, Instincts Awaken, yesterday, and...well, E was hard.

Did you know that before Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, the standard spelling was "elfin"?  He thought the spelling was too twee for his stately conception of the elves and he battled with his publishers until they accepted his "elven" and "elvish." All the elves you see running around in modern fantasy novels are pretty much the direct result of Tolkien's massively popular reimagining of fairies and elves based on Icelandic legend.

But sometimes, I feel like Tolkien made the elves a little too magical, stately, and remote.  Certainly, I'd be very scared to write my brand of sexy romantic discipline with them.  But the elves, speaking in literary terms, are close cousins to the fae and, like many other modern authors, I've taken the fae and twisted them to fit my own perverse desires.  The Fae Surrender series takes place in modern Chicago, where the fae have integrated and intermarried to a large extent with generations of humans.  This vibrant magical community exists right alongside our mundane one, hidden with glamors and illusions. 

In my conception of the fae, they co-evolved alongside humans from a different source, one with a feline background.  Hence their luminescent eyes, pointed ears, and rather unusual mating rituals.  You see, while the fae will sometimes just get married, that's not really satisfactory to their powerful instincts.  Instead, as I hinted in my C is for Claiming post, the males want to publicly mark and claim their mates to demonstrate their complete mastery in an act of ritual dominance.

And what does that mean for a half-fae girl raised outside the more traditional community when her submissive instincts become too strong to be denied?

You'll just have to wait until July to find out.  But tune in Sunday when F is for Fae for a first peek inside Instincts Awaken.

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